


Testament

by weakinteraction



Category: Q.U.E.E.N. - Janelle Monáe (Music Video)
Genre: F/F, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-07 12:31:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18873271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: The end is coming.





	Testament

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merryghoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merryghoul/gifts).



Janelle sits, almost motionless, effortlessly poised. Someone unacquainted with her might think that she's not paying attention, but Badoula knows her better than that. Much better.

"Show me," she says eventually.

Badoula nods, and Nate comes forward, puts the bundle of rags on the table in front of her, and gingerly unwraps it.

Janelle still doesn't move, at first just looking at it keenly: the pulsing blue glow from deep inside it, the twisted shape of the muzzle. It is recognisable as a gun, though, recognisable as something that you pick up and point at someone else who you don't mean well. Apparently some things don't change that much through the centuries. Won't change. Whichever. Badoula has long since exhausted her reserves of patience with such niceties, whether they are purely grammatical or proxies for underlying philosophical paradigms of free will and predestination.

Eventually, Janelle picks it up. Quickly, confidently, her every movement economical -- and even in the middle of this tense situation, a miniature shudder runs through Badoula at the memory of what those deft fingers can do -- she turns it around, examining it from every angle. After another moment of stillness, she suddenly twists something and a small glowing _something_ \-- Badoula instinctively thinks of it as a power cell, though she has no way to know if she's right -- falls out into Janelle's hand, leaving the weapon inert.

"This is what we've been waiting for," she says. "What we've been planning for all along."

Badoula can't tell if "we" means Wondaland, or the other "we" -- the one that even within the organisation, only a few know about: Janelle and Cindi.

"If the TCA are here ..." Nate doesn't finish the sentence. Doesn't want to, Badoula thinks. But he also doesn't need to.

"They'll find us soon enough," Janelle says. "We have to be ready for them."

"We're really going to do this?" Nate says.

Janelle says nothing. She is already staring at the gun.

"Yes," Badoula says. "We are."

* * *

It's late when Janelle finishes. Badoula's taking her turn on sentry duty, watching out in case the TCA have located the headquarters. They've not used their published address, a matter of public record, as anything except a front for years. They have to make sure that any information that might make its way into the data networks of the future is no help to the Time Council.

"Time for your inoculation," Janelle says, holding up what used to be the gun. Apart from the way it glows, it's unrecognisable now, transfigured into something more like a syringe. Form following function. Still something you point at someone, but when you meant to help them.

"The others have already had theirs?"

"The others are asleep, they can have it in the morning." Janelle breaks into a smile. "You think I want to use you as a test subject? I already did myself."

"Did it ... did it hurt?"

"Tingled a bit, maybe."

"OK, OK, do me, then," Badoula says.

Janelle holds the device up to the nape of her neck and ...

_Everything is happening at once, her life laid out like an old-fashioned film strip, one frame after another after another._

_All those times that she'd had to hide who she was. And the times when she hadn't._

_The first time she sang in public, on stage. The terror of it giving way to sheer elation as she connected to something beyond herself that she had always known had been there._

_The last time she and Janelle made love, the night before last._

_All of it: childhood, adolescence, now--_

_She knows she shouldn't look, but nor can she_ not _look. Her future is there too, laid out the same as her past and present--_

Janelle is rubbing the back of her neck, the tiny pinprick entry wound, bringing her back to the present.

The feeling fades. The _knowledge_ fades. Except the knowledge that she has been protected, that whatever the TCA's weaponry might do to her, her consciousness will remain her own.

"Tingled a bit, you said?"

"Something like that."

"I think you may have been underselling it."

Janelle stops rubbing, leans against her. "I don't want to sleep," she says.

Badoula thinks she knows why. Janelle doesn't want to have one of her dreams; one of the Cindi dreams. Doesn't want to find out for sure what's about to happen. Or, perhaps, she's worried that the inoculation will mess with the dreams, break apart everything they've built.

"I can think of ways to pass the time," Badoula says.

"You're supposed to be on sentry duty!"

"If they knew we were here, they'd have been here _before_ us," Badoula says.

"So why are you out here instead of sleeping with-- I mean, like the others?"

Badoula turns round, answers her only with a kiss.

* * *

Their lovemaking is initially more slow and tender than is usual for them. Badoula had a hint of this, in that moment that Janelle inoculated her, a part of the future she almost couldn't help but experience. But as they become more excited, the familiar rhythms they've played together so often rise up, yet another improvisation on the same themes. Janelle's fingers, her lips, press at Badoula urgently and Badoula surrenders to it, letting Janelle bring her to the sort of orgasm that leaves her both utterly satisfied and desperate for more.

As they kiss, Badoula takes charge -- she can feel the precise moment when Janelle allows her to -- and rolls Janelle over onto the tangled sheets. She kisses her way down her lover's body, in trails that swerve away at the last minute. Until Janelle can't take the teasing any more, and her mask drops just for a moment with a hissed "Please", and Badoula is only too happy to oblige, using her tongue, her lips, then her fingers too, using the way she knows Janelle's body so well to take her straight from one orgasm to another, and another ... Until Janelle is shaking all over, her hips bucking under Badoula's hands as she finally stops, knowing just when to do so to wrest one final climax from her lover.

They lie together afterwards. Badoula doesn't know what Janelle is thinking, though she does know why she doesn't want to sleep -- she doesn't want to have another Cindi dream, not know, not when they're so close to meeting her in person. From the dream Cindi's point of view, it's already happened; it's the entanglement between the future Janelle's brain and the past Janelle -- no, the present Janelle, the one that's present with her, right here and now -- that's enabled the whole masterplan to come together.

Badoula thinks back to the experience of the inoculation. If she could have told herself as a child, that one day she'd be part of a movement to liberate the 28th Century, what would that child have said to her?

She realises that she knows the answer. Her past self would have told her to do it, would have remembered all the hiding, all the dissembling. But would she have been able to, if she had known, or would she have been too scared?

Eventually, she decides to ask Janelle. "Aren't you scared? Not even a little bit?"

Janelle thinks about her reply for a moment, and Badoula can tell that the mask has gone back up, that she's calculating exactly how to respond. "I'm more scared of what will happen if we don't," she says in the end.

Badoula decides that it's close enough to an admission, after all.

* * *

Most of the attendees at the party don't know that it's a farewell. They think that it's a launch. And it is: this single is the final component in the interlocking mechanism of Project Q.U.E.E.N., designed to stretch across centuries, a mechanism they must have absolute faith in. Janelle's comes because it has already worked from Cindi's point of view. Badoula's faith, though, is in Janelle. She thinks that's true for most of the others, too.

As with all the other works that form part of the project, they have to make sure that the song is widely disseminated, make sure that the TCA can't suppress it entirely. So they're playing them: by making the launch so public, the TCA will be able to track them down. Even as they raid them, the TCA will guarantee that word spreads, that bootleg copies and peer-to-peer streaming will keep the song alive, keep the freedom movement _in motion_.

Badoula reaches for Janelle's hand, feels it clasp firmly around her own.

And they perform. They _testify_.

When the raid happens, it's a blurred confusion of shouting and running, the lights blacking out before the drones fly in with their own. Through it all, they keep playing, until finally the TCA agents raise their weapons and fire, and the music stops.

* * *

"It's hard to stop rebels that time travel," the voice says, for literally the countless time.

Badoula is trapped inside this frozen moment, her consciousness on a loop. She can no longer tell whether her awareness is resetting to the moment the time gun fired, over and over and over, or if every day has blurred into the next to such an extent that it no longer matters.

Opposite her, Janelle sits, now utterly motionless, just as poised as she always was.

"It's hard to stop rebels that time travel," the voice begins again.

Badoula looks across at Janelle, and thinks: not hard. Impossible.

And then, both a moment and an eternity after they first performed it, the music starts again.


End file.
